Jane:

If you want reports that are more like DOS, use a fixed width font, like Courier New. Using a "Windows Font" that is proportionally spaced, you can estimate the amount of space required for a textbox by using FontMetrics to get info about the height of characters, height of ascenders and descenders and the avg and max. width of characters of a given font, style and size. At times, I've estimated how large the field should be, opened the report as a table and changed the size of various fields in table.

HTH
Mike